Hey guys, in this video we’re going to see how good of a rock / metal sound we can get
out of a guitar practice amp while recording it at home.
So of course there’s a lot of different ways to record guitar at home, and there’s
also some direct recording options that work really well, but I wanted to do this as a
little bit of a recording challenge.
Let’s start with the equipment setup we’re using.
The guitar is a Gibson Les Paul Studio running through an Ibanez practice amp that I paid
about $25 for at a pawn shop once.
The amp is pretty similar to what you get with a lot of those electric guitar starter
kits.
On its own, the tone of this amp isn’t that great in the room to begin with, so getting
a nice sound will be a challenge.
Here’s the sound from the amp just recording with the camera and the Zoom H5 audio recorder.
I’m recording it with a Shure SM57 through a Focusrite 18i20 audio interface into Reaper
as the digital audio workstation.
Obviously we can see that this setup is a little unbalanced, since we’re using a pretty
low end amp with some higher end equipment, but I wanted to show people that it is possible
to record a half decent guitar sound this way.
A big part of the final sound we’ll get recording is the other instruments.
We also recorded bass and used a virtual instrument to create the drums, and this really helps
fill it out.
Here’s the bass and drum tracks we’re starting with.
Now let’s start recording the first guitar track.
This is with the SM57 near the center of the speaker capsule, giving us a brighter sound.
This is everything together so far with the one guitar track, bass, and drums.
Now I’ll record a second guitar track, with the microphone pointed a little more towards
the outside of the speaker, giving us a warmer sound without as much high end.
Here’s the two tracks together.
Right now when we play this back we get a fairly bad solid state guitar sound, and that’s
the problem with working with one of these practice amps.
I want to make a much bigger sounding guitar track out of this, so what I’ll do is pan
one track hard left and the other hard right.
This won’t change the sound in mono, but in stereo it will give us a much bigger guitar
sound.
On a simple track like this it works well, but it can be difficult to mix this later
on some bigger projects.
Here’s the double tracked stereo guitar sound.
We have a few things left to do now.
I’ll create a bus that allows us to apply effects to both guitar tracks at once, then
I’ll add a little bit of equalization and some reverb.
Here’s the final product that we got from this practice amp.
It’s not bad, the tone isn’t amazing since we’re limited by the guitar amp, but it’s
a fairly useable sound.
Thanks for checking out this video on recording a guitar practice amp.
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